Overview

About the Student Video Tutorials in this Resource

This resource is a collection of student presentations on materials science topics. Students created short videos using Wolfram Mathematica software to create visualizations with supporting well-narrated and well-commented code to enhance understanding of various materials science topics. The objective was to make a presentation to teach their peers. These teaching videos were the final project assignment in the MIT course 3.016 Computational Methods for Materials Scientists (OCW archive) and the equivalent course taught by MIT professor W. Craig Carter at L’École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Course 3.016 is primarily a practical survey of mathematics that a materials scientist will find useful. The emphasis is on advanced calculus, linear algebra, ordinary and partial differential equations, interpreting and visualizing results, and the development of mathematical models of physical systems. In parallel to learning mathematics skills, 3.016 teaches students to use Mathematica to help solve problems.

Though there are many mathematical software programs to choose from (Python, Matlab, Maple, NumPy, and Julia are good languages too), 3.016 uses Mathematica because it has powerful graphics, has a tremendous amount of built-in functionality, has excellent documentation and support, is highly versatile, is used in image processing to economics, and, importantly, is fun!